A Cognitive Linguistic Approach To The Study Of XYZ Construction Meatphor

The research on metaphor tends to be more diverse and multi-dimensional owing to many insightful studies from verbal to discourse level. Notwithstanding, these researches have covered nearly all aspects but the type of complicated structure metaphor, ignoring the specialties of linguistic formations in metaphorical expressions.Besides, previous studies had focused more on the analysis of the binary structure of metaphor, which is always in the form of X is Y, than on multi-element metaphor with complicated structures because of the restriction of the XY thought pattern. Complicated structure metaphor, however, requires at least three elements evolving in the process of mapping. XYZ construction metaphor, for instance Chess is the exercise of wisdom, differs greatly from what we usually encounter in XY metaphor in terms of its particular mapping, constructing and understanding.It takes the interaction of cognitive elements to apprehend the meaning of XYZ construction metaphor rather than the simple addition of semantic contents on the surface. The mapping relations vary from the syntactic structures and semantic elements, upon which the apprehension of complicated structure metaphor could be based. Although there are only three elements in the surface structure of XYZ construction metaphor, the deep structure underlying it is the analogical construction which can be called XYZW metaphor that accounts for the tremendous differences of XYZ metaphor from XY metaphor.Both XYZ and XYZW metaphor are commonly grounded on the construction of conceptual relations, which, is essence, is to map one conjunction onto another. Conceptual relations can turn elements within a cognitive domain into a conjunction that plays the role of a background frame, under which is a conceptual process of verbal transformations, offering an additional cognitive context to surface expression.XYZ construction metaphor can, to a large degree, reflect the internal cognitive process and mechanism of complicated structure metaphor. The study on XYZ construction metaphor could further our comprehension of metaphor from the point of linguistic forms because only one XY structure cannot represent the whole mapping process of metaphor completely. Based on the detailed analysis of substantial XYZ metaphors, this thesis attempts to make some tentative contributions to the study of complicated structure metaphor by virtue of unveiling the deep cognitive mechanism of XYZ construction metaphor.